Friday, February 27, 2009

This week our facility is filled with bone doctors, this is the first time we have had this group here. At the beginning of the week it was our downstairs hall, with 8,000 people for the research meeting and now it’s all the upstairs halls for the general meeting. Big sections of the floors are filled with low boards on which they place posters describing projects. I was first introduced to this poster concept by our heart surgeon friend from Sweden, who came to Vegas for a similar thing for heart doctors several years ago. They create a poster that is about a meter square displaying information on whatever it is they are working on, with pretty technical descriptions and x-rays and photographs, and a select few are then picked then to give lectures and presentations.

This is definitely an area that I have had little contact with. I’ve been programming computers for a while, worked in a lot of industries and have had to learn details about how things work in order to make programs that fill needs, but medical research has not been on my list. I wrote down a few of the poster titles that just seemed to say something, but just what I am not sure. ‘Optical targeting of distal locking screws of imrubs’, ‘cartilage repair evolutions: from autologous chrondrocyte to bone-marrow-dreived cells transplantation’, ‘incidence of patella fracture after tka with two resection technology’, osteotomy of the first metacarpal with trapezieplasty: and alternate treatment for reizarhrosis’, superaramagnetic iron-oxcide (SPIO) labeled human chondrocytes and syovium-dreived stromal cells: transfection efficiency, cellular toxicity and localization by magnetic force’. Yes, I can figure out a few of the words and some of the concepts, and I’m sure the medical among you will probably get more, but such combinations of words are just beyond my experience. Perhaps I was right in not becoming a doctor, but if I did then probably it would be more understandable.

The show floor is packed, the estimates were for 30,000 attendees and it looks like a lot more. People have come from all over the world for this, and it is interesting to wander around and hear all of the different languages being used. Many of the booths are large, with big drug companies and electronic companies putting up huge displays, x-ray machines and computer displays are being demonstrated, counters are full of surgery tools, almost every booth has glass examples of bones and joints and spines. There are a lot of video screens showing micro surgeries in action, and a whole section of the floor is taken up by an educational area, with dozens of doctors sitting with headphones quietly watching videos of operations. Most shows have busy days and light days, but for this one it seems everybody is here every day. Almost everyone has a laptop computer in a shoulder bag; the tables in the food court are filled with groups having intense discussions, people bringing up things on their laptops to show and discuss, or just taking notes on computer.

This is the most formal show I’ve seen, with most of the visitors wearing suits and ties. I play a game of trying to guess where people are from based on how they dress. So far the only consistencies are: doctors from China and Hong Kong are all wearing baggy black suits with white shirts, even the women, and are generally young; doctors from Italy are dressed in really nice tailored grey suits with pastel shirts and are in their late 30’s; doctors from the US favor black suits and ties as well, but there are a lot in tan pants and dark blue blazers, no tie, sometimes a golf shirt underneath and mostly older. The ratio of men to women is about eight to one, with the women being well dressed also.

Nascar is also in town. There are races up at the speedway this weekend, yesterday there was a big parade down the Strip with the Nascar painted trucks (sorry I missed it, no photos of the trucks here). It provides for an interesting combination, when we go for our lunchtime walk we’ve been outside all week with temps in the mid 70’s, clusters of doctors in black suits standing around while crowds of people in colorful Nascar shirts and windbreakers moving through. It has been a warm week, resulting in something happening out in our yard we didn’t expect.

Our peach tree has started blooming. When we first moved here that April it was one big pink ball, some years the leaves come out before the blossoms so we miss the pink mass, this year the flowers are very early, I hope we don’t get a late frost that would cause them all to drop. The warm looks like it will continue, with Sunday scheduled to have a high of 77f, low of 53f (25c, 12c) and sunny. Of course sunny.

Next week brings my favorite show; the Halloween show. This has always produced the most enjoyable exhibits, with lots of costumes and spiderweb guns and fog machines and ghostly noisemakers. I can do without explicit videos of exposed kneecaps being operated on; give me the inflatable Frankenstein monsters. (yes, I know he was the doctor, but what was the creature's name?)

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

This past weekend was Cirque weekend here in Vegas, at least for us. In order to generate local business a lot of casinos and restaurants run specials for people that live in Las Vegas, usually half off the second meal or a free dessert or something. Normally casinos offer things during the month of December, as that is a fairly quiet month for visitors, but with the economy like it is the number of tourists is a lot lower than it was last year, so there are more offers now. Back in December Cirque du Soleil advertised $49 tickets for locals to some of their shows, and since we like most of their shows and this is really a low price I figured why not support the local economy and went out and bought some tickets.

Well, the first restriction was that you had to go to the casino where the show was in order to purchase the tickets. Normally I just go across the street during lunch and buy tickets over at the TI for any Cirque show (there are seven around town). Now, it might not seem like such a big deal to actually go to where the show is in order to buy tickets, but heck, living in town we don’t want to go down and mingle with the tourists unless we have to. And then there is the navigation of parking garages: well, that is probably several posts alone there, the quality of parking garages here in Vegas. Every big casino or hotel has their own parking garage, most are accessible from back streets (except for the Bellagio, only way to hit that one is from the center of the Strip, a driving nightmare in itself), and most sacrifice driving room for more parking spaces and mark really narrow parking spaces in order to save money and still meet the building permit restrictions of number of spaces per number of rooms or whatever. The worst parking garages are at the Venetian and at MGM. These are the two biggest hotels in town, and have the absolute worst places to park. They both have garages that are about ten or twelve floors high, with the lower three or four reserved for valet parking, with really narrow driving lanes and up and down ramps that are positioned in odd places.

There are two basic parking garage styles in Vegas (oh well, looks like I’m headed in that direction, might as well continue); the first where the entire garage is one big spiral, with continuous parking all the way up with a driving lane down the middle of the parking rows. The other type is with flat floors where you park and separate ramps where you drive up or down to the next floor. The nice garages have ramps that start at one end and proceed all the way up to the top in one flow, with places at each floor to get to the parking spaces. This way you drive up towards the top and find spaces easily, as most people try to park lower down. With the spiral style you are continuously dodging cars pulling out of spaces, and waiting for people sitting in their car blocking the way as they wait for another car to pull out. At the MGM the ramps just go up one floor, and then you have to drive around looking for the ramp to go up higher, dodging the same parking idiots as before, and it’s located over on the east side of the Strip, which would require that I cross that obstacle. The MGM garage probably holds around 5,000 cars. And I wanted to purchase tickets to KA, which is at the MGM. Oh well.

Two of the shows offering the ticket specials are KA and Zumanity. My wife really liked KA so I figured we could go see that one again, and Zumanity is one of the few Cirque shows that we had not seen yet. The other we haven’t seen is Love, but that one didn’t offer the cheap tickets. Now $49 might not seem cheap to you (it doesn’t to me) but the top price for KA tickets is $150 (plus taxes and fees) and Zumanity $129, so that is a reasonable discount. Zumanity is over at New York New York (so nice they named it twice) which is across the street from the MGM, located on the west side of the Strip (the side I live on) and has parking garage access from a back street. Rather than stopping on my way home from work (my place of employment is center Strip, a long walk from the MGM at the south and an even more time consuming drive) I went home and drug B along. I think it was faster to drive home and then back down behind NYNY than it would have been driving down the Strip from work, avoiding all the stupid tourists gawking at the neon (oh, sorry, I mean the visitors that make this town what it is, sorry) (and there is no more neon, it’s all giant video screens now). This was back in mid December after the specials were advertised; I’ve missed out on things like this by waiting and figured I’d be quicker on this offer.

So we navigate the construction obstacles over on Frank Sinatra Drive behind the new City Center and slide in to the back of the NYNY garage, which does have the nice central straight ramp style and nice wide driving aisles but narrow parking spots. Right up to the top of the ramp, around a curve and up to floor six, which was nice and empty. We walked down to the Zumanity box office and got two tickets, then we walked over to the MGM via the direct walking bridge, wandered all the way to the back of the casino (where these things are usually located, to get you past the slot machines and hopefully take some more of your money on the way) and found the MGM box office. The box office was rather empty, as the show was closed for a few weeks during the slow time, so the performers could get some vacation time in, with only one worker who was rather slow at helping us. I guess there is no reason to keep the intelligent positive people on when tickets aren’t being sold.

We stopped at the Rain Forest Café for something to eat. This was a really popular place when it first opened; a theme restaurant made to look like a jungle hangout, with trees and vines overhead filled with animatronics animals that periodically came to life as you ate. Unfortunately the opening was quite a few years ago and now the overhead plants all looked like they had an inch or so of dust on them, and the animals are getting a little ragged. When it first opened the MGM Grand was part of the then popular themed resorts, catering to families with kids. Casino owners finally realized that families with kids don’t gamble too much and don’t go to the expensive fancy restaurants, so the profit margins are low and now most hotels have dropped the kid friendly themes. The MGM Grand patterned itself after the movies that the MGM Studios owned, with the casino having a yellow brick road to walk down headed to the rides at the kid’s park in the back (also long gone, replaced by condo towers). Along the walk were people dressed in movie themes, such as Dorothy and the Scarecrow, and characters from whatever movies were being pushed. You used to walk in on the corner, between two big MGM lions, right onto the yellow brick road, but now there are pedestrian bridges and the two lions have been changed to a single bigger one. The casino has new carpets and the characters are gone, but the lion habitat is still there in the middle, with some sad old lion laying around behind glass having it’s picture taken by the tourists.

The tickets we purchased two months ago were for shows this past weekend. We hit Ka on Friday and Zumanity on Sunday. I didn’t pay much attention to the seating maps when we got the tickets, and so were surprised at where we ended up. At KA we were down in the eighth row over to the side, in the expensive area. At Zumanity we were in the fifth row right in the middle of things, rather than way up in the balcony where I expected to be. Ka was as impressive the second time as it was when we first went there, with a cast of fifty or so running around stages that moved back and forth and flipped through the air. B says that she was able to look at details she missed before, and we’ll probably go back again to catch even more of it. Zumanity is the ‘adult side of Cirque’, with a lot of skinny girls in topless outfits performing on stage. There were a lot of risqué jokes, girls wearing G-strings and nothing else in giant martini glasses and swinging on ropes and poles and fabric, bare-chested guys wrestling and a dwarf and two sisters that did not fit in the skinny girl mold and lots of things happening. It wasn’t full nudity, but they don’t let anyone under 18 in the show. It was more of the old style Cirque, with an open stage and just people performing an assortment of stunts. There were about twenty performers who each did a few bits, more like a variety show than a themed evening. The girls were ‘topless’, but also athletic performers, which meant that there is probably more breast in one enhanced performer in a typical Vegas topless joint than was total for all the Zumanity girls combined. It was entertaining, but not in the grand show style, and not really worth the $129 each that some people paid (probably not worth the $49 we paid). But KA was only about two thirds full (and that on a Friday night!) while Zumanity appeared to be sold out. (An inside joke if you do go to see Zumanity: the mistress of ceremonies is really a guy, she did look pretty good though.)

We parked over in the NYNY garage for both shows, and ate at different restaurants each night. No, I still haven’t had the tasting menu over at Joel Rubichon’s place yet, still hard to take the $350 per person hit on that one (plus wine), no matter how decadent it is. It was warm on Sunday but cloudy, we ended up at the Irish pub at NYNY as I felt like having fish and chips. Usually Sundays are pretty empty days here, as most tourists come for the weekend and fly out Sunday afternoon, and the new crowd for the upcoming week has not yet arrived, but there was a 45 minute wait at the restaurants there. Rather than wait we ate out on the patio (no waiting) - a little cool, as it was down to 67f by that time. We did catch a few drops of drizzle as we were finishing up, no rain was predicted and we did not get enough to measure, but did feel something falling and sure hope it wasn’t somebody from the balcony above us. As we paid I found that the pub’s local promotion was giving the second glass of Guiness for free, but I passed on that as I didn’t want to fall asleep during the show. So it was two pleasant evenings spending some tourist dollars right here in town.

Wow, a whole post with no photos. OK, have to put something here. For those of you unfamiliar with just how big parking garages can be here is a shot I took of the Wynn employee garage across the street from where I work. It’s smaller than the guest parking garages, and a lot shorter, but it might give you some idea of the size. This is just one side of the cube:

Yes, it continues off to both the left and right of the photo. I couldn’t get back far enough to get it all in. That’s our monorail track up in front. I'm not sure of the size, but it probably holds around 6,000 cars.

Friday, February 20, 2009

In following the tradition of Clare we return again to E Friday, where I post photos of my darling granddaughter E, because VG really likes to look at these pics.

E and her mom were down visiting last week. It was a little cold here, but not as bad as back at their house in Portland. We did have sunshine, and of course the first thing she wanted to do was run outside and hit the swing. She pulled her shoes off, because after all ‘it’s OK to go barefoot at Grammie’s’ and ran out the door. She was back in a few seconds because the stones outside were just a little too cold for those bare feet. She ended up with a sweatshirt and mittens, leaving the heavy winter wear in the closet for their return north.

And after swinging for a while she made nice hot frog head soup at the stove. (somebody gave us this little group of clay frogs playing musical instruments, which I think is a popular piece of junk to pick up in Tijuana, since it does not really fit in with our decorations inside it has been relegated out to the garden, where the heads have all broken off as it gets tossed around. E puts them in her pot to cook up on the stove when she comes by)

Mom wanted to hit her favorite Mexican restaurant, which was done right after they got in from the airport. E wanted to hit her favorite restaurant, Red Robin, which was done the next day. However, in the car on the way she was very defiant about not wanting to go to RR. After Grammy discussed the chocolate milk there she did agree to go, but warned that after this she never wanted to go back there again. Unfortunately it looks like that desire will come true, as there was a sign on the door indicating that location was closing due to lack of business. It’s on the corner of Sahara and Decatur, where the Chili’s across the street just closed the day before, the Circuit City also resides, as well as several other big stores that have recently closed. A sign of the economy I guess, if the places people usually visit often are ending up closing due to lack of customers. I guess lots of people are cutting back, including the former employees of those business places. Anyway, E didn’t get chocolate milk (she never does) but a regular cup of milk in a RR cup, along with a cheeseburger.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

It’s been a fairly nice week here in Las Vegas. We had a cloudy day yesterday for a change, and even some rain. It was part of that big storm system that covered California, but by the time it made it over the mountains there wasn’t much water left. We had about .14 inches of water fall from the sky yesterday, making February the wettest month in a year, with a whole .66 inches (what, just under 2cm?) of rain so far. This did result in another six inches of snow up in the mountains, so the Vegas valley is surrounded now by white hills. This was very noticeable this morning, with the sun coming up as I was driving in to work I could see the western mountains in my rear view mirrors and they were bright with the new snow. No clouds in the sky at all this morning, just that bright blue which drew us here and the nice sunshine.

The mountains surrounding Vegas are all rock, with no trees or shrubs visible. Mt. Charleston does have trees, and our local ski resort. It’s a forty minute drive north from downtown, and lots of people go up there just to play in the snow. Vegas is at about 2,000 feet above sea level, with our surrounding mountains around 10,000 feet and Charleston at 14,000 feet. Usually the mountains look black, after some snow last weekend they changed to white and then as the snow melted the past week there were broad horizontal bands of black and white and by Saturday they were all black again, but after yesterday they are now all white. It looks like we might have some clouds later in the week, but no rain predicted yet. It is 36f right now heading to a high of 53f, but by next weekend the temperatures will be up in the high sixties.

No pictures of the snow around us, there isn’t any place to pull over when driving into work to take a shot from, but last year when we drove up north I took this one, which is similar. Except we have a full wall of mountains to the west rather than one lone peak like this.

With the weather warming up and the freezing nights behind us it was time to do yard work, so this past three day weekend was busy with tree trimming and bush cutting and general cleanup. We had a big apple tree in the back corner, which looked to be about thirty years old. Unfortunately it has some kind of disease, and each year another big branch just died off. I started trimming it on Sunday when B suggested we just take it all down, so now all that is left is a big stump. With the rains the ground is fairly soft, so it looks like I’ll be digging up the stump this week. The apples were small and not very edible, so what we lost was mostly the shade. It was planted right underneath our power lines, so rather than put in a replacement I think I’ll stick in another one of the shoestring Acacias like the two we have by the kitchen. These grow high but do not spread, so I should be able to get it over to the side where it will miss the power lines, but being on the south side of the yard it should still give some shade over in that corner.

I have never had allergy problems, but since moving to Las Vegas six years ago I seem to have developed some. I was rather sick last week, the same symptoms as the flue, head all stopped up and hurting, dizzy and coughing from the drainage down my throat. I went to my regular doctor to see about getting another one of those Kenalog shots that has been working for me, but since I was a walk in at the doctor’s office I was passed on to somebody new rather than the regular doc I have been seeing. He advised against the injection as Kenalog causes diabetes as a side effect, which I do not want to even get into. He suggested that I see an allergy specialist, so last Thursday I took off early to see somebody new. It took him about three minutes, after saying hello and a little side talk, to say "Every February? This is the 12th, so you are allergic to ash trees". If I was later in the month it would have been mulberry, then on into other things that bloom. The end result: some new prescriptions, to be taken during the ash blooming season. Oh well, more pills, but they do work very well and my head is clear and clean. That is living in the desert - the trees and bushes put out so much pollen that almost everybody develops an allergy to something.

Last weekend B drove down to Phoenix to see her sisters. Our daughter came down with E to go along; I just got to enjoy her for a day between the plane flight from Portland and the drive down to Phoenix. The road down to Phoenix first heads east passes over Boulder Dam before turning south. The road over the dam is the only road across the Colorado for hundreds of miles, with Lake Mead stretching north blocking access. One of the security responses to 911 was the posting of guards on the dam, who search cars and trucks for something (I don’t know what). There is so much concrete in the dam that even a large truck filled with explosives was set off on top of the dam no major damage would result. The fear of that happening caused the closure of the dam route to large trucks, which are now forced to detour south a hundred miles to cross the Colorado River down at Laughlin. This also results in traffic jams near the dam, because of cars being searched, which can add up to six hours to a simple trip.

As a response to security concerns the federal government decided to build a bridge across the Colorado just south of the dam. The bridge has been under construction for several years now, with another year or so to go before completion. The one think the government did not fund was the road leading to the bridge. This is unfortunate, as little Boulder City sits between Vegas and the new bridge. Boulder City was created back in the ‘30s to house people working on construction of the dam, and due to some severe growth restrictions has remained a rather small town. Traffic to the dam passed right through downtown, and in the past few years traffic has increased and the city has created a bypass road that circles through traffic past the city center, but still on surface streets. With all trucks routed south on I-95 for the past seven years the city has still had a big increase in car traffic. Once the bridge is open all of those trucks will once again pass through the middle of Boulder City, and they are not looking forward to the increase in traffic. City officials have been searching for money from somewhere to build a big freeway around the city, to get all of those wheels off the downtown streets, but now with money tight it looks like nothing is forthcoming. B took a picture while on the dam looking south at the new bridge.

You can’t see it too well in the picture, but the big arch that will support the roadway from underneath is being put together from both sides, creating a 2,000 foot long bridge with one arch. Well, with the canyon and river below there isn’t any other way to do it. There is a cable system up above it all that works like a big crane, lifting segments and supplies. A few years ago high winds ripped the cable system out of the mountainside, resulting in a delay of almost a year while it was rebuilt. There is a web site devoted to the project at Dam Bypass, there is even a webcam that you can use to look at construction. Here is what it is supposed to look like when finished:

OK, since we’ve missed her for a few weeks, here she is wearing Grammie’s glasses.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Last week was the 50th anniversary of the day the music died. A plane crash in Ohio killed three famous musicians. They were all ahead of my musical experience; I was most familiar with the expression and event from Don McLean’s song. I just got out of the navy and was driving back from California to New Jersey. American Pie was released first in the New York area and then spread across the country. As I drove (I think it was four days) I first heard the song in LA and rather infrequently out west, then more and more until it was being played every hour by the New York stations, which was a major commitment because it was a nine minute song. All of those repetitions burned it into my brain and I probably remember all the words even today. The people in the plane crash included:The Big Bopper

Richie Valens

Buddie Holly (wow, such an excited audience for this performance)

I've grown up on rock and roll and all kinds of music. Watching the above video several times I look at the crowd standing around, the girls in their prom dresses and guys in suits and ties and wonder what it was like for them to suddenly get this new music. In Back to the Future everybody just jumps in when this new sound pops up. But I've also seen movies of record burnings and rants about how this new boogie woogie music would rot the minds and corrupt the morals of our little children (some people are still saying that). So I really cannot put myself in the shoes of these background people, listening to that trio with the tinny guitar singing a song that I just can't dance to.

Wednesday, February 04, 2009

It’s been a rather pleasant week here in Las Vegas. The weather has been unusually warm during the day, down near freezing when I get up in the morning to drive to work. We live about three miles west of the Strip, and I work in a building right in the ‘heart of it all’, so my morning drive is eastward. During the winter months this means I drive in the dark, but as the days start to lengthen I now face the sunrise. I still make it around that corner headed for the parking lot before the sun peeks up, but it will not be much longer before the sun is right there, dead ahead just above the trees and below the visor, tearing into my eyes as I try to see the idiots cutting people off ahead of me. But for now I get the deep blue clear sky and the lightening horizon. Because it’s the desert out here there is very little humidity, which means that we do not get the nice orange and red sunrises those of you on the east coast get to see. Sometimes there are clouds, but usually it’s just a gradual brightening.

On Saturday the temp was up around 68f (near 20c) and bright and sunny, so B wanted to go out and find some new sneakers. She had been looking at the mall stores and did not find what she wanted (plain white low sneakers with Velcro closings) so she thought the bigger shoe stores at the outlet mall might have some. We have two big ‘outlet malls’ here in Vegas, originally an outlet mall was a place where manufacturers sold their unsold merchandise and articles with small defects and very low prices, but since there are now several of these malls in every large American city the goods sold there are really just cheaper versions of the name brand products sold in larger stores. There is a large indoor version down on the south end of Las Vegas Boulevard, which also has a large merry go round ride that E liked, and a newer outdoor one just across the freeway from downtown. This one is closer to us, so B decided to go there. It’s right across from the County center, where we attend the free outdoor jazz in the park concerts in May and June.

The county center is the mixture of brick buildings to the right, with the pyramid in front and the round building to the rear. The above picture is looking east from the fourth floor of the parking garage, right at downtown Vegas. The mall used to have nice large parking lots, but when they expanded the number of stores they constructed two five story parking garages. These are about the worst places to park, they are small and are basically just a long spiral ramp with parking all along. The spaces are small, so as to meet the building department’s requirement for number of cars it can handle. The driving path is also narrow, making it really hard to turn into a space, which is so narrow that it is hard to open your car door to get in or out. And of course some sucker in a huge SUV will end up parking next to you. But every space was taken, and we had to drive up and down waiting for somebody to pull out. The warm weather pushed all of Vegas to go outside this weekend, and the mall was packed with people wandering around.

To the left of that picture is the new Lou Ruvo Brain Institute still under construction. Part of UNV they will perform research there, including looking at Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative brain disorders. The building is designed by architect Frank Gehry, who is also responsible for the design of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles among others , the building is composed of two parts, one with the weird contorted shapes and another with neatly stacked boxes, reflecting the two hemispheres of the brain (hey, I don’t make this up, I just look it up elsewhere).

Tuesday, February 03, 2009

When we lived in San Diego different entertainment groups would periodically come by and put on performances. SD is a large city, but many of the big name concerts did not stop, usually hitting Los Angeles instead of our area a hundred miles away. One group that did come through twice was the Kodo drummers from Japan. I don’t know if they are still touring, but if they do wander through your area be sure to go see them. It is very entertaining, not really as dramatic on CD or video as you can’t really feel the concussion produced when six guys use baseball bats to whomp on drumheads that are six feet across. This is a musical performance even the deaf would really feel.Bill reminded me of them in a post he put up a while ago.

This is more of an advertising video from Sony pushing one of their albums, but it does show the range of drums and instruments used along with scenes from the island where they originate.

In a totally different drumming direction is the song with the most famous drum solo that came around when I was in college. They weren’t making music videos back then, so all that we are left with are old men with long hair and white beards reprising their youth back together again to perform and make some retirement money. This one isn’t quite the same as on the album I still have, but pretty close: In A Gadda Da Vida (baby):

One of the greatest drummers from the 40’s was Buddy Rich. Here is is in a drum competition with the drummer from Dr. Teeth: Animal

Animal played with a lot of famous people. Another person not really associated with the drums was Harry Belafonte, but he does pretty good on a single instrument, and he looks like he is really having fun:

OK, as long as I’m bouncing around those related video links at the bottom we might as well look at my favorite again. E’s down, and I seem to have her hooked on this one too (sorry, no drums in this one at all, but you can sing along)